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An antihero, or antiheroine, is a protagonist who lacks conventional heroic qualities such as idealism, courage, or morality.[1][2][3][4][5] These individuals often possess dark personality traits such as disagreeableness, dishonesty, and aggressiveness. These characters are usually considered "conspicuously contrary to an archetypal hero".[6]

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The antihero archetype can be traced back at least as far as Homer's Thersites.[7]:197–198 The concept has also been identified in classical Greek drama,[8] Roman satire, and Renaissance literature[7]:197–198 such as Don Quixote[8][9] and the picaresque rogue.[10] Although antiheroes may sometimes do the "right thing", it is more because it serves their self-interest rather than being morally correct.[11]

Literary Romanticism in the 19th century helped popularize new forms of the antihero,[13][14] such as the Gothic double.[15] The antihero eventually became an established form of social criticism, a phenomenon often associated with the unnamed protagonist in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground.[7]:201-207 The antihero emerged as a foil to the traditional hero archetype, a process that Northrop Frye called the fictional "centre of gravity."[16] This movement indicated a literary change in heroic ethos from feudal aristocrat to urban democrat, as was the shift from epic to ironic narratives.[16]

The antihero entered American literature in the 1950s and up to the mid-1960s was portrayed as an alienated figure, unable to communicate.[21]:294-295 The American antihero of the 1950s and 1960s (as seen in the works of Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, et al.) was typically more proactive than his French counterpart; with characters such as Kerouac's Dean Moriarty famously taking to the road to vanquish his ennui.[22] The British version of the antihero emerged in the works of the "angry young men" of the 1950s.[8][23] The collective protests of Sixties counterculture saw the solitary antihero gradually eclipsed from fictional prominence,[24] though not without subsequent revivals in literary and cinematic form.[21]:295